How Do You Make a Place?
Lessons in Placemaking from Three Very Different Projects
Three distinct projects; three rather different developers.
The first, Damon Hemmerdinger, Co-President of ATCO, could have come, to borrow a phrase from one of our current presidential candidates, from central casting. Wonkish and cerebral in both appearance and affect, it wasn’t at all surprising to learn that he was a New York developer who had made his way out of the city, first to Austin, and more recently to Charlotte, where he undertook a massive redevelopment project to create a contemporary live, work, play environment.
The second, Rich Rodriguez, COO of Construction and Development at Amherst, was a former Navy SEAL. Where Hemmerdinger was a bit reserved, Rodriguez had a gregarious and commanding demeanor that was perfect for either leading soldiers in a war or overseeing a construction crew in a seemingly quixotic endeavor in the Middle East to create the world’s tallest building.
The third, Casey Roloff, CEO of Seabrook, had the laid back persona of a surfer, but the imagination of an artist; the kind of developer that wasn’t satisfied with creating just a project or even placemaking, but wanted to build an entire town along a deserted piece of Washington coastline from scratch.
For all their contrasts, these three developers, who each gave a presentation as part of the Vision Stage curated by Thesis Driven at this year’s Blueprint Conference in Las Vegas, shared something: the ability to see how an entire place could be fashioned from something inchoate. And they each offered insights that those who hope to follow in their footsteps could benefit from, including:
The tools that can create a distinctive community
How innovation is relative and based on context
The draw of creating something unique
The importance of possessing a clarion vision that you’re working towards
Today’s letter will dive into each of their projects through the stories and lessons they shared at Blueprint.
Camp North End, Charlotte
It’s a testament to how much placemaking has evolved in the past two decades that a project like ATCO’s Camp North End — which involves the redevelopment of a 76-acre former Ford factory turned US military production facility into a mixed-use live, work, play environment — could almost feel conventional at this point.
Like so many of its brethren across the country, Camp North End features a familiar mix of residential, office, and retail spaces. Again, like many other projects, residential is the prime mover here; at least 1,800 units are planned, with the first 300 to debut this fall. There are already 25 food and beverage operators on site as well as 20 office tenants.
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